But an Australian government study released last week found
that over all, last year brought “the highest sea surface temperatures across the Great Barrier Reef on record.”
Only 9 percent of the reef has avoided bleaching since 1998, Professor Hughes said,
and now, the less remote, more heavily visited stretch from Cairns south is in trouble again.
“In the north, I saw hundreds of reefs — literally two-thirds of the reefs were dying and are now dead.”
The damage to the Great Barrier Reef, one of the world’s largest living structures, is part of a global calamity
that has been unfolding intermittently for nearly two decades and seems to be intensifying.
“We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years,” said Terry P. Hughes, director of a government-funded center for coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia and the lead author of a paper on the reef
that is being published Thursday as the cover article of the journal Nature.
Large Sections of Australia’s Great Reef Are Now Dead, Scientists Find -
By DAMIEN CAVE and JUSTIN GILLISMARCH 15, 2017
SYDNEY, Australia — The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has long been one of the world’s most magnificent
natural wonders, so enormous it can be seen from space, so beautiful it can move visitors to tears.
Water temperatures there remain so high that another round of mass bleaching is
underway, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority confirmed last week.